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In-band Task Provisioning for DAP
draft-wang-ppm-dap-taskprov-03

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This is an older version of an Internet-Draft whose latest revision state is "Active".
Authors Shan Wang , Christopher Patton
Last updated 2023-03-13
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draft-wang-ppm-dap-taskprov-03
Privacy Preserving Measurement                                   S. Wang
Internet-Draft                                                Apple Inc.
Intended status: Informational                                 C. Patton
Expires: 14 September 2023                                    Cloudflare
                                                           13 March 2023

                   In-band Task Provisioning for DAP
                     draft-wang-ppm-dap-taskprov-03

Abstract

   An extension for the Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) is
   specified that allows the task configuration to be provisioned in-
   band.

About This Document

   This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.

   The latest revision of this draft can be found at
   https://wangshan.github.io/draft-wang-ppm-dap-taskprov/draft-wang-
   ppm-dap-taskprov.html.  Status information for this document may be
   found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-wang-ppm-dap-
   taskprov/.

   Discussion of this document takes place on the Privacy Preserving
   Measurement Working Group mailing list (mailto:ppm@ietf.org), which
   is archived at https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/ppm/.
   Subscribe at https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ppm/.

   Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at
   https://github.com/wangshan/draft-wang-ppm-dap-taskprov.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

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   This Internet-Draft will expire on 14 September 2023.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2023 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/
   license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document.
   Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
   and restrictions with respect to this document.  Code Components
   extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as
   described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are
   provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Conventions and Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   3.  The Taskprov Extension  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.1.  Deriving the Task ID  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     3.2.  Deriving the VDAF Verification Key  . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     3.3.  Configuring a Task  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     3.4.  Supporting HPKE Configurations Independent of Tasks . . .   8
   4.  Client Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   5.  Leader Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     5.1.  Upload Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     5.2.  Aggregate Protocol  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     5.3.  Collect Protocol  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   6.  Helper Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   7.  Collector Behavior  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
   8.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
   9.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
   10. Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
   Contributors  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13

1.  Introduction

   The DAP protocol [DAP] enables secure aggregation of a set of reports
   submitted by Clients.  This process is centered around a "task" that
   determines, among other things, the cryptographic scheme to use for
   the secure computation (a Verifiable Distributed Aggregation Function
   [VDAF]), how reports are partitioned into batches, and privacy
   parameters such as the minimum size of each batch.  Before a task can
   be executed, it is necessary to first provision the Clients,
   Aggregators, and Collector with the task's configuration.

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   The core DAP specification does not define a mechanism for
   provisioning tasks.  This document describes a mechanism designed to
   fill this gap.  Its key feature is that task configuration is
   performed completely in-band.  It relies solely on the upload channel
   and the metadata carried by reports themselves.

   This method presumes the existence of a logical "task author"
   (written as "Author" hereafter) who is capable of pushing
   configurations to Clients.  All parameters required by downstream
   entities (the Aggregators and Collector) are encoded in an extension
   field of the Client's report.  There is no need for out-of-band task
   orchestration between Leader and Helpers, therefore making adoption
   of DAP easier.

   The extension is designed with the same security and privacy
   considerations of the core DAP protocol.  The Author is not regarded
   as a trusted third party: It is incumbent on all protocol
   participants to verify the task configuration disseminated by the
   Author and opt-out if the parameters are deemed insufficient for
   privacy.  In particular, adopters of this extension should presume
   the Author is under the adversary's control.  In fact, we expect in a
   real-world deployment that the Author may be implemented by one of
   the Aggregators or Collector.

   Finally, the DAP protocol requires configuring the entities with a
   variety of assets that are not task-specific, but are important for
   establishing Client-Aggregator, Collector-Aggregator, and Aggregator-
   Aggregator relationships.  These include:

   *  The Collector's HPKE [RFC9180] configuration used by the
      Aggregators to encrypt aggregate shares.

   *  Any assets required for authenticating HTTP requests.

   This document does not specify a mechanism for provisioning these
   assets; as in the core DAP protocol; these are presumed to be
   configured out-of-band.

   Note that we consider the VDAF verification key [VDAF], used by the
   Aggregators to aggregate reports, to be a task-specific asset.  This
   document specifies how to derive this key for a given task from a
   pre-shared secret, which in turn is presumed to be configured out-of-
   band.

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2.  Conventions and Definitions

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
   "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in
   BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
   capitals, as shown here.

   This document uses the same conventions for error handling as [DAP].
   In addition, this document extends the core specification by adding
   the following error types:

       +=============+============================================+
       | Type        | Description                                |
       +=============+============================================+
       | invalidTask | An Aggregator has opted out of the         |
       |             | indicated task as described in Section 3.3 |
       +-------------+--------------------------------------------+

                                 Table 1

   The terms used follow those described in [DAP].  The following new
   terms are used:

   Task configuration:  The non-secret parameters of a task.

   Task author:  The entity that defines a task's configuration.

3.  The Taskprov Extension

   The process of provisioning a task begins when the Author
   disseminates the task configuration to the Collector and each of the
   Clients.  When a Client issues an upload request to the Leader (as
   described in Section 4.3 of [DAP]), it includes in an HTTP header the
   task configuration it used to generate the report.  We refer to this
   process as "task advertisement".  Before consuming the report, the
   Leader parses the configuration and decides whether to opt-in; if
   not, the task's execution halts.

   Otherwise, if the Leader does opt-in, it advertises the task to the
   Helpers during the aggregate protocol (Section 4.4 of [DAP]).  In
   particular, it includes the task configuration in an HTTP header of
   its first aggregate request for that task.  Before proceeding, the
   Helper must first parse the configuration and decide whether to opt-
   in; if not, the task's execution halts.

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   To advertise a task to its peer, a Taskprov participant includes a
   header "dap-taskprov" with a request incident to the task execution.
   The value is the TaskConfig structure defined below, expanded into
   its URL-safe, unpadded Base 64 representation as specified in
   Sections 5 and 3.2 of [RFC4648].

   struct {
       /* Info specific for a task. */
       opaque task_info<1..2^8-1>;

       /* A list of URLs relative to which an Aggregator's API endpoints
       can be found. Defined in I-D.draft-ietf-ppm-dap-04. */
       Url aggregator_endpoints<1..2^16-1>;

       /* This determines the query type for batch selection and the
       properties that all batches for this task must have. */
       QueryConfig query_config;

       /* Time up to which Clients are allowed to upload to this task.
       Defined in I-D.draft-ietf-ppm-dap-04. */
       Time task_expiration;

       /* Determines the VDAF type and its config parameters. */
       VdafConfig vdaf_config;
   } TaskConfig;

   The purpose of TaskConfig is to define all parameters that are
   necessary for configuring an Aggregator.  It includes all the fields
   to be associated with a task.  In addition to the Aggregator
   endpoints, maximum batch query count, and task expiration, the
   structure includes an opaque task_info field that is specific to a
   deployment.  For example, this can be a string describing the purpose
   of this task.

   The query_config field defines the DAP query configuration used to
   guide batch selection.  It is defined as follows:

   struct {
       QueryType query_type;         /* I-D.draft-ietf-ppm-dap-04 */
       Duration time_precision;      /* I-D.draft-ietf-ppm-dap-04 */
       uint16 max_batch_query_count; /* I-D.draft-ietf-ppm-dap-04 */
       uint32 min_batch_size;
       select (QueryConfig.query_type) {
           case time_interval: Empty;
           case fixed_size:    uint32 max_batch_size;
       }
   } QueryConfig;

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   The vdaf_config defines the configuration of the VDAF in use for this
   task.  It is structured as follows (codepoints are as defined in
   [VDAF]):

   enum {
       prio3_count(0x00000000),
       prio3_sum(0x00000001),
       prio3_histogram(0x00000002),
       poplar1(0x00001000),
       (2^32-1)
   } VdafType;

   struct {
       DpConfig dp_config;
       VdafType vdaf_type;
       select (VdafConfig.vdaf_type) {
           case prio3_count: Empty;
           case prio3_sum: uint8; /* bit length of the summand */
           case prio3_histogram: uint64<8..2^24-8>; /* buckets */
           case poplar1: uint16; /* bit length of input string */
       }
   } VdafConfig;

   Apart from the VDAF-specific parameters, this structure includes a
   mechanism for differential privacy (DP).  This field, dp_config, is
   structured as follows:

   enum {
       reserved(0), /* Reserved for testing purposes */
       none(1),
       (255)
   } DpMechanism;

   struct {
       DpMechanism dp_mechanism;
       select (DpConfig.dp_mechanism) {
           case none: Empty;
       }
   } DpConfig;

      OPEN ISSUE: Should spell out definition of DpConfig for various
      differential privacy mechanisms and parameters.  See issue #94
      (https://github.com/cfrg/draft-irtf-cfrg-vdaf/issues/94) for
      discussion.

   The definition of Time, Duration, Url, and QueryType follow those in
   [DAP].

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3.1.  Deriving the Task ID

   When using the Taskprov extension, the task ID is computed as
   follows:

   task_id = SHA-256(task_config)

   where task_config is the TaskConfig structure disseminated by the
   Author.  Function SHA-256() is as defined in [SHS].

3.2.  Deriving the VDAF Verification Key

   When a Leader and Helper implement the task_prov extension in the
   context of a particular DAP deployment, they SHOULD compute the
   shared VDAF verification key [VDAF] as described in this section.

   The Aggregators are presumed to have securely exchanged a pre-shared
   secret out-of-band.  The length of this secret MUST be 32 bytes.  Let
   us denote this secret by verify_key_init.

   Let VERIFY_KEY_SIZE denote the length of the verification key for the
   VDAF indicated by the task configuration.  (See [VDAF], Section 5.)

   The VDAF verification key used for the task is computed as follows:

   verify_key = HKDF-Expand(
       HKDF-Extract(
           task_prov_salt,  # salt
           verify_key_init, # IKM
       ),
       task_id,             # info
       VERIFY_KEY_SIZE,     # L
   )

   where task_prov_salt is defined to be the SHA-256 hash of the octet
   string "dap-taskprov" and task_id is as defined in Section 3.1.
   Functions HKDF-Extract() and HKDF-Expand() are as defined in
   [RFC5869].  Both functions are instantiated with SHA-256.

3.3.  Configuring a Task

   Prior to participating in a task, each protocol participant must
   determine if the TaskConfig disseminated by the Author can be
   configured.  The participant is said to "opt in" to the task if the
   derived task ID (see Section 3.1) corresponds to an already
   configured task or the task ID is unrecognized and therefore
   corresponds to a new task.

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   A protocol participant MAY "opt out" of a task if:

   1.  The derived task ID corresponds to an already configured task,
       but the task configuration disseminated by the Author does not
       match the existing configuration.

   2.  The VDAF, DP, or query configuration is deemed insufficient for
       privacy.

   3.  A secure connection to one or both of the Aggregator endpoints
       could not be established.

   4.  The task lifetime is too long.

   A protocol participant MUST opt out if the task has expired.

   The behavior of each protocol participant is determined by whether or
   not they opt in to a task.

3.4.  Supporting HPKE Configurations Independent of Tasks

   In DAP, Clients need to know the HPKE configuration of each
   Aggregator before sending reports.  (See HPKE Configuration Request
   in [DAP].)  However, in a DAP deployment that supports the Taskprov
   extension, if a Client requests the Aggregator's HPKE configuration
   with the task ID computed as described in Section 3.1, the task ID
   may not be configured in the Aggregator yet, because the Aggregator
   is still waiting for the task to be advertised by a Client.

   To mitigate this issue, if an Aggregator wants to support the
   Taskprov extension, it SHOULD choose which HPKE configuration to
   advertise to Clients independent of the task ID.  It MAY continue to
   support per-task HPKE configurations for other tasks that are
   configured out-of-band.

   In addition, if a Client intends to advertise a task via the Taskprov
   extension, it SHOULD NOT specify the task_id parameter when
   requesting the HPKE configuration from an Aggregator.

4.  Client Behavior

   Upon receiving a TaskConfig from the Author, the Client decides
   whether to opt in to the task as described in Section 3.3.  If the
   Client opts out, it MUST not attempt to upload reports for the task.

      OPEN ISSUE: In case of opt-out, would it be useful to specify how
      to report this to the Author?

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   Once the client opts in to a task, it MAY begin uploading reports for
   the task.  Each upload request for that task MUST advertise the task
   configuration.  In addition, each report's task ID MUST be computed
   as described in Section 3.1.

5.  Leader Behavior

5.1.  Upload Protocol

   Upon receiving a task advertisement from a Client, if the Leader does
   not support the extension, it will ignore the HTTP header.  In
   particular, if the task ID is not recognized, then it MUST abort the
   upload request with "unrecognizedTask".

   Otherwise, if the Leader does support the extension, it first
   attempts to parse the "dap-taskprov" HTTP header payload.  If parsing
   fails, it MUST abort with "unrecognizedMessage".

   Next, it checks that the task ID indicated by the upload request
   matches the task ID derived from the extension payload as specified
   in Section 3.1.  If the task ID does not match, then the Leader MUST
   abort with "unrecognizedTask".

   The Leader then decides whether to opt in to the task as described in
   Section 3.3.  If it opts out, it MUST abort the upload request with
   "invalidTask".

      OPEN ISSUE: In case of opt-out, would it be useful to specify how
      to report this to the Author?

   Finally, once the Leader has opted in to the task, it completes the
   upload request as usual.

5.2.  Aggregate Protocol

   When the Leader opts in to a task, it SHOULD derive the VDAF
   verification key for that task as described in Section 3.2.  The
   Leader MUST advertise the task to the Helper in its first aggregate
   request incident to the task.  It MAY also include the advertisement
   subsequent requests; if opted in, the Helper MUST ignore these
   advertisements.

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5.3.  Collect Protocol

   The Collector might issue a collect request for a task provisioned by
   the Taskprov extension prior to opting in to the task.  In this case,
   the Leader would need to abort the collect request with
   "unrecognizedTask".  When it does so, it SHOULD also include a
   "Retry-After" header in its HTTP response indicating the time after
   which the Collector should retry its request.

      TODO: Find RFC reference for "Retry-After".

      OPEN ISSUE: This semantics is awkward, as there's no way for the
      Leader to distinguish between Collectors who support the extension
      and those that don't.

6.  Helper Behavior

   Upon receiving a task advertisement from the Leader, If the Helper
   does not support the Taskprov extension, it will ignore the extension
   payload and process the qggregate request as usual.  In particular,
   if the Helper does not recognize the task ID, it MUST abort the
   aggregate request with error "unrecognizedTask".  Otherwise, if the
   Helper supports the extension, it proceeds as follows.

   First, the Helper attempts to parse payload of the "dap-taskprov"
   HTTP header.  If this step fails, the Helper MUST abort with
   "unrecognizedMessage".

   Next, the Helper checks that the task ID indicated in the upload
   request matches the task ID derived from the TaskConfig as defined in
   Section 3.1.  If not, the Helper MUST abort with "unrecognizedTask".

   Next, the Helper decides whether to opt in to the task as described
   in Section 3.3.  If it opts out, it MUST abort the aggregate request
   with "invalidTask".

      OPEN ISSUE: In case of opt-out, would it be useful to specify how
      to report this to the Author?

   Finally, the Helper completes the aggregate initialize request as
   usual, deriving the VDAF verification key for the task as described
   in Section 3.2.

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7.  Collector Behavior

   Upon receiving a TaskConfig from the Author, the Collector first
   decides whether to opt in to the task as described in Section 3.3.
   If the Collector opts out, it MUST not attempt to upload reports for
   the task.

   Otherwise, once opted in, the Collector MAY begin to issue collect
   requests for the task.  The task ID for each request MUST be derived
   from the TaskConfig as described in Section 3.3.

   If the Leader responds to a collect request with an
   "unrecognizedTask" error, but the HTTP response includes a "Retry-
   After" header, the Collector SHOULD retry its collect request after
   waiting for the duration indicated by the header.

8.  Security Considerations

   This document has the same security and privacy considerations as the
   core DAP specification.  In particular, for privacy we consider the
   Author to be under control of the adversary.  It is therefore
   incumbent on protocol participants to verify the privacy parameters
   of a task before opting in.

   In addition, the Taskprov extension is designed to maintain
   robustness even when the Author misbehaves, or is merely
   misconfigured.  In particular, if the Clients and Aggregators have an
   inconsistent view of the the task configuration, then aggregation of
   reports will fail.  This is guaranteed by the binding of the task ID
   (derived from the task configuration) to report shares provided by
   HPKE encryption.

      OPEN ISSUE: What if the Collector and Aggregators don't agree on
      the task configuration?  Decryption should fail.

   A malicious coalition of Clients might attempt to pollute an
   Aggregator's long-term storage by uploading reports for many
   (thousands or perhaps millions) of distinct tasks.  While this does
   not directly impact tasks used by honest Clients, it does present a
   Denial-of-Service risk for the Aggregators themselves.

      TODO: Suggest mitigations for this.  Perhaps the Aggregators need
      to keep track of how many tasks in total they are opted in to?

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9.  IANA Considerations

      NOTE(cjpatton) Eventually we'll have IANA considerations (at the
      very least we'll need to allocate a codepoint) but we can leave
      this blank for now.

10.  Normative References

   [DAP]      Geoghegan, T., Patton, C., Rescorla, E., and C. A. Wood,
              "Distributed Aggregation Protocol for Privacy Preserving
              Measurement", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-
              ietf-ppm-dap-04, 13 March 2023,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-ppm-dap-
              04>.

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119>.

   [RFC4648]  Josefsson, S., "The Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data
              Encodings", RFC 4648, DOI 10.17487/RFC4648, October 2006,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4648>.

   [RFC5869]  Krawczyk, H. and P. Eronen, "HMAC-based Extract-and-Expand
              Key Derivation Function (HKDF)", RFC 5869,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC5869, May 2010,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5869>.

   [RFC8174]  Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
              2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
              May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8174>.

   [RFC9180]  Barnes, R., Bhargavan, K., Lipp, B., and C. Wood, "Hybrid
              Public Key Encryption", RFC 9180, DOI 10.17487/RFC9180,
              February 2022, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9180>.

   [SHS]      "Secure Hash Standard", FIPS PUB 180-4 , 4 August 2015.

   [VDAF]     Barnes, R., Cook, D., Patton, C., and P. Schoppmann,
              "Verifiable Distributed Aggregation Functions", Work in
              Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-irtf-cfrg-vdaf-05, 13
              March 2023, <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-
              irtf-cfrg-vdaf-05>.

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Contributors

      CP: Unless the order is meaningful, consider alphabetizing these
      names.

   Junye Chen Apple Inc. junyec@apple.com

   Suman Ganta Apple Inc. sganta2@apple.com

   Gianni Parsa Apple Inc. gianni_parsa@apple.com

   Michael Scaria Apple Inc. mscaria@apple.com

   Kunal Talwar Apple Inc. ktalwar@apple.com

   Christopher A.  Wood Cloudflare caw@heapingbits.net

Authors' Addresses

   Shan Wang
   Apple Inc.
   Email: shan_wang@apple.com

   Christopher Patton
   Cloudflare
   Email: chrispatton+ietf@gmail.com

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